Bad Billy Bob
Umm… Billy Bob Thornton decides to jump in the Christian Bale/Joaquin Phoenix throw-down of who can be a bigger jackass.
– Chase
Trailer: “Where the Wild Things Are”
This one’s from Hulu, so less likely to disappear. Looks stunning and the Arcade Fire is a fine choice for this piece of hipster nostalgia.
Movie Review: “Sunshine Cleaning”
Rating: 73
Just as the title implies, “Sunshine Cleaning” is about disinfecting a mess, whether it’s a crime scene or a life filled with mistakes. Someone has to do the dirty job that Rose and Norah Lorkowski take on, and redemption could be found in all those gallons of industrial disinfectant.
Rose (Amy Adams) was captain of the cheerleading team in high school, but that was her high point. About 15 years later, she is cleaning houses for a living and continuing a long-standing and fruitless affair with her high school boyfriend Mac (Steve Zahn). Every day, Rose repeats affirmations in a search for elusive self-esteem, but cannot break free of being the cutest, sweetest doormat in Albuquerque.
Like Rose but without the obvious charm, Norah (Emily Blunt) is just a stoned mess who cannot hold down even the worst fast-food job. The Lorkowski sisters and their father Joe (Alan Arkin) all got damaged individually by a family tragedy, leaving each with a life on the margins and the possibility that Rose’s smart-but-troubled son Oscar (Jason Spevack) is on the same path.
But then after one of their depressing motel trysts, Mac, a homicide detective, suggests that Rose could make a lot of money cleaning up after his cases. She wheedles her way into a crime scene with the recently fired Norah in tow, and they start mopping up blood. Of course they’re not certified for this line of work, but the forms and tests can wait.
If the plot of Christine Jeffs’ film seems stitched together from several independent movie tropes, the characters and actors help “Sunshine Cleaning” transcend those ideas. Adams and Blunt are convincing as siblings who ultimately find some meaning in their lives through mopping up viscera — after all, there were once real people in these blood-stained rooms. While Rose and Norah’s makeshift operation is far from perfect, dealing in mortality could supply some kind of breakthrough for both sisters.
Like “Wendy and Lucy,” also opening in Oklahoma City this week, “Sunshine Cleaning” depicts people barely operating at subsistence level. It’s not where anyone wants to be, but so many people end up there, either by accident or the ugly nature of the economy. These characters resonate as people grapple with their own tough times, whether it’s due to recession or their own difficulties in breaking out of spirals.
Movie Review: “Wendy and Lucy”
Rating: 76
For the working poor, safety nets are not part of the equation — the dominoes start falling hard if just one unexpected expense pops up. Kelly Reichardt’s simple and affecting drama “Wendy and Lucy,” which begins a two-week engagement at the Oklahoma City Museum of Art, illustrates this true, day-to-day nightmare, and Michelle Williams makes it seem far more real than most people would care to experience up close.
Wendy Carroll (Williams) does not have many options. While driving with her dog Lucy from Indiana to Alaska, where she plans to find work at a fish cannery, Wendy doesn’t stop at hotels: she finds quiet parking lots and sleeps behind the wheel, hoping no one will tell her to move along. No such luck in Oregon — awakened by a security guard, Wendy soon discovers that her ancient Honda Accord will not start and it will cost money she doesn’t have to get it towed and fixed.
A desperate act in a grocery store (and a run-in with a self-righteous employee) results in Wendy’s arrest, a fine and Lucy’s disappearance. Now facing destitution without her best friend, Wendy spirals into depression as her expenses multiply and her options are subtracted. No one, including family back home, has much means or inclination to help Wendy, and the transition from nomadic worker to homelessness becomes a short fall. Even finding a lost dog costs money.
Wendy is a character with no remarkable characteristics other than being average. She hasn’t fallen on hard times — for Wendy, all times are hard and getting harder. And there might be a way forward, but it will not be a smooth road and any momentum will come with great sacrifice.
Not everything is spelled out, but Williams fills her character with the kind of quiet desperation that tells a life story, one in which all the good breaks went to people with more money, talent, brains, ingenuity, connections or physical beauty. “Wendy and Lucy” does not present us with a pitiful character, but with the worst-case scenario — one that more and more people are facing today.
DVD Review: “Happy-Go-Lucky”
Rating: 80
Whether he is exploring Gilbert and Sullivan’s creation of “The Mikado” or following a World War II-era abortion provider, Mike Leigh packs his films with wonderful improvisational actors. The result is a bracing realism once the improvised dialogue is honed to a loose script, and this is especially true of “Happy-Go-Lucky,” a funny and poignant character study of a woman who always looks on the bright side of life.
Sally Hawkins should have been recognized with an Oscar nomination for Poppy, a grade school teacher with an endless capacity for good vibes. While Poppy seems sealed in a bubble of cheer, the rest of the world is less sunny. When Scott (Eddie Marsan), the bilious counterpoint to her positivity, becomes her driving instructor, Poppy doesn’t quite know what to make of this human wave of anger, but even Scott’s hate storm cannot obscure Poppy’s sunshine.
Leigh’s naturalistic style is well-suited to following Poppy’s good times, whether it’s uproarious evenings at the pub or mornings at school, caring for a troubled student and hitting it off with a school psychologist. Some subplots are just loose ends, but the dramatic centerpiece is the hilarious and unsettling relationship between Poppy and Scott. Hopefully, “Happy-Go-Lucky” will not be the last time Leigh puts Hawkins and Marsan together — their characters’ chemistry is strictly oil and water, but the actors mix it up beautifully.
“Monsters vs. Aliens”: Hubba, Hubba
Now, that's what I call statuesque
Every so often I find it cleansing to make a creepy admission. And so here’s my latest.
I saw Monsters vs. Aliens and have to admit its central character, Susan Murphy, (voiced by Reese Witherspoon) is, well, pretty darn sexy. Once a mysterious meteorite transforms her into a 50-feet bride, Monsters dials up the 3-D pulchritude with Susan as a ginormous platinum blonde in a form-fitting wedding dress.
Betty Boop would be proud.
– Chase
Trailer: “Funny People”
Is Judd Apatow the new James L. Brooks? Not that there’s anything wrong with that. I’m just saying.
DVD Review: “Pride and Glory”
Rating: 33
So familiar you can smell the plot points five minutes before they arrive, “Pride and Glory” trades in the same brawling, cop-and-criminal family drama that filled James Gray’s “We Own the Night” and Phil Joanou’s “State of Grace.” At 125 minutes, it is one long slog to an inevitable end as brother clashes with brother clashes with brother-in-law, all filmed in a sickly blue tint that makes “Minority Report” look positively warm by comparison.
When four undercover officers are killed, Police Chief Francis Tierney Sr. (Jon Voight, dishing out the ham) assigns his son, former hotshot detective Ray (Edward Norton) to the case. The Tierney clan is deeply wrapped in the killings, since the officers reported to Francis Tierney Jr. (Noah Emmerich) and a chief suspect is Ray’s brother-in-law, Jimmy Eagan (Colin Farrell), a cop moonlighting as a hitman and drug dealer.
“Pride and Glory” only entertains in fits and spurts: Voight has a nice moment of light drunkenness during a Christmas dinner, wobbling as he extols the virtues of his miserable clan. But in modern crime dramas, the juxtaposition of Christmas songs and melodramatic cheer with buckets of blood has been overworked as much as Irish cop clans and battling brothers. Writer-director Gavin O’Connor and co-writer Joe Carnahan (“Smokin’ Aces”) pump enough profanity into “Pride and Glory” to fill two Martin Scorsese mob hits, but this macho mess never earns its grit and winds up feeling like a cold case.
Lebowski Day, May 7-8, Los Angeles
Little Lebowski Urban Achievers, take note: LebowskiFest 2009 rolls out this year with a two-day party in Los Angeles, including a movie party May 7 at the Wiltern Theatre and a bowling party the next day at Cal Bowl. And there are 15 other parties scheduled this year throughout North America, including Louisville, Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, San Diego, Las Vegas, Austin, Minneapolis, Chicago, Toronto, Boston, Philadelphia, Washington DC and New York.
We need to get one going in OKC. I understand the big deal about having it in Los Angeles, though. See, they call Los Angeles the “City Of Angels”; but I didn’t find it to be that, exactly. But I’ll allow it as there are some nice folks there. ‘Course I ain’t never been to London, and I ain’t never seen France. And I ain’t never seen no queen in her damned undies, so the feller says. But I’ll tell you what – after seeing Los Angeles, and this here story I’m about to unfold, well, I guess I seen somethin’ every bit as stupefyin’ as you’d seen in any of them other places.
Check out LebowskiFest here.
Movie Review: “Waltz With Bashir”
Rating: 74
Whether “Waltz With Bashir” is a documentary in the purest sense is an open question: Ari Folman’s film about Israel’s 1982 war with Lebanon is a digitally animated battle memoir containing only a few minutes of unretouched footage at the end. But given Folman’s difficult premise — the painstaking recreation of memories lost in the fog of war — “Waltz With Bashir” accomplishes its goals and tells its story vividly and inventively.
Folman begins in a bar, where a former Army buddy tells him of a recurring dream in which he is chased by 26 wild dogs. The number is always the same. Folman is sure there is a connection between the nightmare and their service in Lebanon 25 years before, but soon realizes that he carries few personal memories of the war. He tracks down several former soldiers, piecing together their collective life during wartime, rediscovering the atrocity and otherworldly oddity of their time in uniform.
Given the need to illustrate these memories and visions, Folman literally illustrated them: “Waltz With Bashir” is rendered with Flash animation of current images and old battles. The look and feel is close to the rotoscoping used in Richard Linklater’s “Waking Life” and “A Scanner Darkly,” or the recent Charles Schwab ad campaign, but in terms of methodology, it’s closer to Brett Morgen’s “Chicago 10,” in which the gaps between archival footage of Abbie Hoffman’s trial were filled with animated recreations.
It’s all done to compelling and psychedelic effect — fantasy seamlessly melds with reality as ‘80s hits by Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark and Public Image Limited drone in the background. The film’s only serious flaw is the distance created by the animation: because these are computer-drawn images, much of the visceral quality of war gets lost in the pixels. But “Waltz With Bashir” is as much about memory and what time does to it as it is about the war being blocked from that memory.
